


Four Gray Walls

by LicieOIC



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Asylum, Caged Rumple, Cursed Belle, Cursed Storybrooke, Dark Thoughts, F/M, Introspection, Missing Characterization, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psych Ward, Psychological Torture, Rated Mature for subject matter, Sexual Abuse, Torture, or in lock-up, potentially triggering to anyone who has ever been on suicide watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 12:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5785477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LicieOIC/pseuds/LicieOIC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty-eight years of the same four gray walls, lost in her own mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four Gray Walls

**Author's Note:**

> I really think that Belle’s post-asylum trauma wasn’t dealt with enough/properly in the show. I’m sorry, but not knowing anything about yourself (or anything else for that matter) for 28 years while locked in a tiny room with next to nothing in it and minimal contact with anyone? That shit is SCARRING.
> 
> For anyone who’s ever experienced being in this sort of lock-up, this little drabble may be triggering. Please read with caution. Writing this was therapeutic for me, but I don't want anyone experiencing a bad flashback for reading this. Please let me know if there are any other warnings I should tag on this fic.

No mirror. The only reason she has an IDEA of what she looks like is because she can see a faint reflection in the surface of the water in the plastic cup she’s given with her meals. Plastic cups, plastic utensils, plastic plates, plastic trays. The mattress she sleeps on is plastic-covered foam. It squeaks every time she moves. So much plastic, she hates the way it feels. 

They keep her nails short after she tried scratching at the walls. She just wanted to make the flat, gray expanse look different, to create _something_ , to express _something_. She hadn’t noticed when her fingers had started bleeding. They had. No more nails. No more scratching.

There is a tiny standing shower in the corner of the room with a meager plastic (more plastic) curtain. Sometimes she stands under the water until it goes cold, hoping it might soothe her constantly tense muscles. She never can seem to relax, even when they pump her full of mind-fogging drugs. With no lip at the bottom of the shower, all the water runs to a drain in the center of her room. She hates it, the water running everywhere. It eventually dries up, but the damp smell lingers and she grew to hate it like she hates everything else about this place.

She only gets that diminished reflection of herself in her cup of water, so she knows her eyes are blue, but has no idea that the true color rivals that of the sky. Or at least the small strip of sky that’s visible through the barred window, high up on the wall next to the bed, always just out of reach, always appearing to be smaller every day. It’s an illusion, she knows, the window just _seems_ smaller, the room just _seems_ like it’s crowding her, she _knows_ this, but it doesn’t stop the illusion from pressing in on her.

If she’d known any songs, she might have sang. To pass the time, to hear her own voice, to make it reverberate off those ugly walls and make herself _sound_ bigger. She could hear the man who swept the halls, sometimes he would hum. Very low, but if she pressed her ear against the door, she could make out little snatches of melody. Sometimes she would attempt to recreate the sound, to connect, to know that she wasn’t the only person in the world, the world of four gray walls. Her voice had grown low and husky over the years, a rasp in her throat from disuse. But it was hers. _Her_ voice. They hadn’t taken _that_ from her yet.

Wherever she is, it rains a lot. Snow sometimes, though she doesn’t get to feel the cold, not with the vent above the door keeping her room at the exact same temperature no matter the weather. The sky is too often gray, blending in with the gray walls around her. She decides it’s a good day when the sky is blue. Not gray. Gray is walls and plastic and loose clothing and socks and medication and silence so loud she could scream.

Blue… blue is freedom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was one aspect of my own experience that I left out, as it didn't really apply to Belle's situation, and that is shaving my legs. I had to ask for a razor, which was a crappy single bladed one, and the nurse had to stand there and watch me shave with only water and soap. And God, was it ever a production if I accidentally cut myself. I know some of you might think "just don't shave," but I really hate the feel of my hairy legs touching each other. It was like one more thing telling me that I was THERE and not HOME.
> 
> But for Belle, who lived in a realm where I doubt shaving was common (unless you were a man and it was his face getting shaved), that probably wouldn't have been a thing for her. Her legs and pits could have just grown to their natural stopping point and she probably wouldn't have cared. So I left that out.
> 
> Anyway, I know this is an angsty and unpleasant thing to read, but I really felt like it wasn't addressed in the show at all and that bothered me. So I hope you enjoyed this for the "missing scene" aspect of it, knowing that she is rescued and regains her lost memories soon after that.


	2. A Metal Cage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Humiliation, slavery, abuse. He knew he deserved it all. The voices said so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, decided to add in Rumple's captivity as well, which results in a significant rating jump, please read cautiously. This is still very heavy stuff, possibly even more so than the last chapter.

A tiny cell forged of metal wire. Barely tall enough for him to stand in. Old straw to sleep on and to spin with. Spinning, spinning, always spinning, since he doesn't need to sleep. But not even the wheel can help him forget his circumstances this time.

At first, he hates being dirty. Having lived so long in sharp suits and silk shirts with the luxury of endless hot water, and then much longer before that in the rarest and most elegant clothing in the realms and magic at his beck and call, he'd forgotten what it had been like living any other way. Living in the same rough, homespun clothes for days at a time since he hadn't owned very many, dealing with odor and oil and filth on a daily basis. He'd all but forgotten those days. He tries not to remember himself back then. (Not that he could ever completely forget. The voices made sure he didn't.)

But he soon learns that it isn't dirt he needs to fear or his clothes growing steadily shabbier or his hair growing lank and oily as stubble grows heavier on his cheeks. No, these small discomforts can be borne. He grows to hate and fear the days where she allows him a shower, even though it means time out of the tiny cage. Because it is on those days, always on those days, where she commands him to fuck her and he can do nothing else but obey.

He is ashamed that he had been one of those people who hadn't thought men could be a victim of a sexual crime. He had been wrong. So very wrong.

She had been angry at first when he couldn't 'get it up' for her. He'd let a remark slip, about how _he_ had to obey the dagger, but that didn't mean his _body_ would. She'd whipped him until he bled for that, ordering him afterward to heal himself. He'd taken the blows with barely any sound. Anything was better than being forced to touch that woman.

But that hadn't stopped her for long. Nothing ever does, it seems, not when she wants something. She came back and merely ordered him to use magic to 'ready' himself for her. She didn't care that he couldn't do it on his own or that he was never, ever even close to a climax throughout the ordeal. She got what she wanted. Meanwhile, he couldn't even enjoy what was happening on a purely sensory level. All of it, every touch, every drop of sweat, every gasp she uttered, it made his skin crawl and his insides clench and his muscles twitch with the urge to run far, far away and never let anything touch him ever, ever again.

Afterward, she'd smile and laugh at him and it was echoed by the voices. _You deserve this,_ they whisper.

He agrees. For all his sins, for everything that he'd gotten wrong in his long life, he had to deserve this hell.

_You got cocky,_ they say. _Too sure of your power, of yourself, sure that no one would ever find a way to hold your leash._

"It was for my boy," he whispers back, his voice a harsh rasp of air. His brave, beautiful boy. "I couldn't let him go. Not again."

_And for that weakness, you will always deserve what you get,_ they say. _You forgot that beneath the mantle of the Dark One, you were nothing, and you always will be nothing. No better than a whipped dog, cowering in his kennel._

They are never silent. Not when he spins, not when he is forced to use the filthy pot in the corner of the cage for its intended purpose, not when she orders him to undress, not when she watches him shower, not when she touches him and it hurts, physically hurts, because he always tries to resist the call of the dagger. He tries and yet another failure, every time. They are relentless when he weeps, when he uses the grimy back of his shirt to clean his pelvis from her slick. (No magic unless she allows it.) But her smell is everywhere and he heaves and retches and wishes for death. Laid so low, every scrap of pride stripped from him. _You deserve it. You deserve it._

He can fold his mind up into a tiny square and hide it in a dark corner of his thoughts, but the voices never let go of him completely. Always the whispers. Always the litany of his failures.

Until one day a hand is outstretched to him. Not to take away... but an offer. A plea. And he looks up... into the bluest eyes he's ever known.

Her touch is a cool, healing balm and that blue swallows his reflection, surrounding him in a protective bubble, so seemingly fragile, but so fiercely strong. And suddenly, he can hear his own thoughts. His alone. His head becomes so... quiet. He hears her voice and suddenly, he can breathe again. His heart, grown so cold, warms to her touch, beats with every one of her breaths. So long as she keeps looking at him with those eyes, the bluest blue in any realm, then he is safe.

Blue... is silence. Blue is home.

 


End file.
